= Building Capacity, Building Power =
The Praxis Project has received funding to make voter registration data
accessible online.
This wiki page is being created to shape a proposal for how to do that.
== Vision ==
Voter registration data is public data that should be made freely available to
everyone equally. At the moment, even where the data is free, it is in widely
disparate formats and extremely difficult to query or import into an existing
database.
The goal of the project is to support grassroots organizing by providing
address information of registered voters to groups that can use that
information to help strategically plan organizing campaigns.
In addition, the ''implementation'' of the project is itself an organizing
project. Getting, parsing, importing and maintaining voter registration data
for the entire country is an enormous task.
Efforts have been made to approach this problem in a traditional/capitalist
way (Jouse: please fill in!), however, that approach has done little to
realize the bigger vision of truly publicly accessible data.
An alternate approach to the logistical problem is to build the project from
the ground up as an open, participatory process. By building the project in
this manner, we can build a team of volunteers to maintain it, much like
popular free software projects are maintained.
== Implementations ==
The key to implementing the project in an organizing fashion is to make it
completely free and open:
* No access restrictions to the data - full read access to everyone
* Separation the project into inter-changing pieces to help keep it
decentralized:
* Database: one database the holds all the information. Direct read-only
access is available to anyone on the Internet. We would encourage anyone
with a server that can handle the load and size of data to mirror the data
to help reduce load
* User interface: we would write one web-based user interface, but not
enforce it as the only user interface. We would encourage others to write
alternative user interfaces and allow them to access the database.
* Import scripts: until the law passes enforcing a standard data format for
voter data (Josue: please fill in!) we will need scripts for each region to
import data into our standard data format
* Open source software: all software used to drive the project is freely
released
* Organize a series of national trainings and coding sprints
== Steps ==
Here are some proposed broad steps:
* Setup the infrastructure. It's important that the project start from the
ground up in an open, web-published environment. Starting with a wiki, ticket
tracking system, and publicly archived email list would be a good start.
* Initial public meeting: Draw a national group of organizers and
technologists to a face-to-face meeting to set a common political agenda for
the group and the initial technical specifications for the project. All
participants (regardless of tech level) will participate in both processes.
* Research: getting the right data model will save a lot of time in the long
run. Based on the vision and technical requirements, make decisions on how
the first implementation will look.
* Initial implementation: Build out the database with a single source of
data. Create the first user-interface. Test. Debug.
* Develop documentation on using the system and instructions to developers on
how to import their data.
* Organizing series of workshops nationally - the draw will be organizers and
technologists - with a focus on: * building the team supporting the project,
getting new users of the system, and encouraging techies to import data from
un-represented regions and commit to updating data over the years.
== Links to similar projects ==
[http://www.voteractivationnetwork.com/ Voter Action Network]
[http://www.catalist.us/ Catalist]
California group